Tag Archives: higher ed

I’ve read this study on academics vs. administrators in several places. The short version is that more than 70% of UK universities have more staff than profs.

No one is highlighting the fact that the most highly-ranked universities (Oxbridge, UCL) are on the list of lowest faculty/staff ratios.

The inference no one’s making: these old grande dames of the university scene still have a collegial governance structure in which professors, rather than staff, (a) make the most important decisions, and (b) do the majority of ‘soft’ work (such as advising).

Why does this matter? Well, the benefits to having professionals advise on curricular choices seems fairly obvious — especially when the alternative is a recent (or not-so-recent) graduate with no more qualifications than a degree in some subject. I would also argue that while staff are needed to handle some issues (for example, mental and physical health should not be entrusted to untrained academics!), other tasks that are often delegated to staff could easily be performed by professors and/or advanced students: writing or math tutoring, for example.

While the follow-up piece rightly points out that professors and staff don’t hate each other, the fact remains that universities need to choose their investments. Staff, especially staff who don’t have terminal degrees, will never be able to expand to research. Professors can easily contract to take on staff duties. And, in the increasingly publish-or-perish atmosphere of the REF, maybe it would be better for UK university heads to take a long, slow breath: not everyone can be a research powerhouse! Instead, try to maximize your faculty in different ways by actually rewarding research, teaching, AND service.

It is well known that eating disorders often develop in the less-structured environment of a residential campus. Even if that were not a concern, over 90% — yes, that means almost all — of women have dieted or tried to lose weight while getting their bachelor’s degrees. (And before any troll starts the fat jokes, half of these women are normal weight.) So WHY IN THE WORLD would a social media campaign take aim at this vulnerable population? (Never mind that actual results were less stellar than reported.)

Here is a “get active” to “teenage girl” translation, in case you don’t know any teenage girls:

take 10,000 steps a day –> walk faster, fatso!

have you exercised today? –> I can’t believe you’re so lazy.

Eat clean! –> OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU ATE ONE SQUARE OF CHOCOLATE YOU ARE SO GROSS

Healthy, right? Isn’t that JUST the message you’d want your daughter/sister/wife/friend/etc. to hear … from her school???

George Fallis joins the lineup of people who JUST. DON’T. GET. IT. Which is really too bad, since he just wrote a book on higher education (and unlike this blog, people will probably read it). Unfortunately, while he makes a few good points (I’ll get to those, too), he falls prey to the usual fallacies: Canada = US and contract = “part-time”.

So let’s start with the good points: Canadian professors, not just administrators, are overpaid relative to inflation (based on the consumer price index — flawed but acceptable) and increases in other salary. YES. As I pointed out in my last postsecondary rant, Canadian profs are overpaid compared to their counterparts in other developed nations, especially south of the border. It’s nice to see someone who takes home one of those nice fat salaries actually admit it. (By the way, Georgie, I don’t see you giving up your pension to help the plebs…?)

Moreover, total revenue to universities is also going up: more butts-in-seats = more $$. Yup — the question is the per-student funding, which is declining.

But. But. Here are the two things that made me sputter:

Number one, the grad students —

Graduate students are paid more than $40 per hour for their work as they complete their studies. And the funding for research, both from the federal and provincial governments, increased even faster than operating grants.

Funding for research has little to do with graduate students, so should not be included as an “increase”. Guess what? When a grad student at U of T wins an OGS ($15k), s/he LOSES money relative to the guaranteed minimum funding of $15k + tuition (this is not true at York, which has a lower guaranteed minimum, so I can see how Fallis might be confused). Moreover, while research funding may have increased, so did the number of graduate students. And not all research moneys are earmarked for graduate study; there are also (a much larger number of) faculty-only grants. So the mention of research here is a red herring. That money goes towards people who are already well off: those who have a tenured or tenure-track position.

As many have pointed out before, graduate funding per hour is also a red herring, because students are not faced with the prospect of increasing their hours in order to make up more money. In most jobs with an hourly wage, if you want more money, you can take on more shifts. Grad students are capped (the hours vary based on university, but if you receive government money, it’s capped at 270 hours). So let’s take that as a standard: you have 270 hours x 40/hr = $10,800. This is in addition to funding if you have an OGS/CGS or federal grant — but then tuition isn’t paid for, so at roughly $7k/yr, you’re only up $3-4k. That puts even an granted scholar, whose work is seen as promising by a group of anonymous professors, at or just under the poverty line. For grad students in the “funded cohort”, it goes towards paying their guarantee of tuition + minimum stipend. In other words, this isn’t EXTRA cash — it’s part of the bill.

Finally, as some commenters have said, you don’t have to go to grad school if you can’t afford it. No one pays for undergrads to go to university. But here’s the thing: yes, you do. Your taxes do. OSAP loans (which are not available to grad students) do. So unless you think that academic study should be pursued not by the intelligent, but by the rich, you should probably pony up a bit of extra dough. Who knows? You might be locking out the person who discovers a cure for Alzheimers’, ALS, or diabetes.

So Falls fails to accurately represent grad student interests. How does he do on contract faculty? Again, not too well:

Presidents, professors, and graduate students are well paid. Part-time instructors not so well. And it is they who must cobble together an annual living on course-by-course contracts, often working in effect full time at a university for many years.

Well, no, not really. In the US, this is true — but as I mentioned before, Canadian contract faculty are paid incredibly well, assuming that they are hired to an adequate number of courses. This fight is NOT ABOUT PER-COURSE COMPENSATION. It’s about job security.

Also, STOP CALLING THEM “PART-TIME INSTRUCTORS”, since you CLEARLY know that they WORK FULL-TIME.

Continuing that same idea:

The compensation and contractual arrangements for part-time instructors are the squeeze point. Universities across North America are all facing the same pressure, a pressure that will shape university finances in the years ahead.

Universities across North America are NOT all facing the same pressures. Many of them have no idea what it’s like to be truly poor (as the cases of Sweet Briar and similar colleges show). York, which has consistently posted an operating surplus (see p. 2), has NO IDEA.

So let’s be honest: when even an educational economist is woefully misinformed (or disingenuous) about the state of the university, higher ed is pretty screwed.

Meanwhile, despite the data referenced in this article, the government shells out for “studies” from not one, but two management consultancies. (I wonder how many contract faculty that would have funded?) This waste of money makes me think that the provincial oversight of labor contracts isn’t going to help any. In fact, even CUPE seems unable to do some basic math:

“Teaching-track jobs are part of a broader structural reform of universities,” said Ahmed, noting the 24 new jobs will start at about $80,000, a far cry from the $7,600 per course that contract profs at York earn on a piecework basis.

I’m pretty good at arithmetic. A teaching-track job is usually a 3-4 or 4-4 load. Let’s assume the former, to be as generous as possible. A 7-course load at $7600/course is just over $53,000 — about as much as an American professor makes for the same amount of teaching. This should tell us something about what the university system really needs: a salary adjustment downwards. A Canadian professor earns 1.3 times as much as his American counterpart, for the most part with a similar tax burden and job description. That means that every three professors could fund a fourth professor, should they accept an American wage.

There’s a lot to be considered here: Canadian universities, for example, all seem to think that they are on par with major research universities (because we all think of Western as the Canadian Harvard?). In general, as the above data show, US teaching-focused universities and colleges pay their professors less. Despite this, I haven’t noticed decreased respect for the tenured professor in the US.

Maybe it’s time for Canada* to reconsider what it values in its postsecondary experience. Since there is very little innovation in Canada, research really shouldn’t be the major goal. In fact, one could argue that a better-educated workforce with better access to startup funding would yield more innovative ideas anyway. Such education is generally associated with a broad-based, liberal arts (that includes math) education, which is typical for the US, but not Canada.

If not, at least the business sector would know how to spell and punctuate — so we all win.

* Apparently other nations are to blame, too — here is an example from Australia.

I’ve become fascinated by the strike narratives. I admit it. I refresh the #cupe stream on my twitter every time there’s about to be a vote.

Sadly, it seems that the media are still completely out to lunch regarding how universities work. In two separate articles, the Globe and Mail repeated that university faculty are meant to do two things: teaching and research.

Canadian universities say they can no longer afford to deliver higher education through tenured academics who may spend more than a third of their time engaged in research. Instead, most universities have decided that, to staff their classrooms at reasonable cost, they must turn, in varying degrees, to contract instructors and teaching-track faculty.

So, what about service? I guess that’s now the job of those expensive administrators?

Let’s get a few things clear:

Research is most important to sciences (hard, social, whatever). The humanities take a hit for being useless on the job market, but they get bums in seats and they are cheap.

It’s usually the university, rather than the profs, who want to (a) see ever-increasing results in the form of published articles in top journals, and (b) bar professors who’d like to do a bit more teaching from the classroom.

No one — seriously, NO ONE — is complaining about teaching-track faculty, which I am glossing as “job security for instructors of record”. Can I repeat that? This is a good thing. Unfortunately, most universities don’t really want to give that job security. Take a look at CUPE’s settlement for contract faculty: it includes a measly 24 positions a year out of a membership of more than 1000.

I also just want to add that while it’s stressful to be contract faculty in Ontario because you have to reapply for your job constantly (remember that terms are only 12 weeks long!), it is nowhere near as stressful to be employed in Canada as it is to be an American adjunct. Let’s just stop pretending, okay?

I don’t want to blame just one newspaper. Here’s another example from The Toronto Star’s education columnist:

This article, also from the Star, gets the trio right. But he doesn’t really understand the concept:

…full-time professors who spend as little as 40 per cent of their time in the classroom, thanks to the traditional formula that tenured professors swear by: 40-40-20.

Under their hallowed rules, most professors spend a mere 40 per cent of their time teaching; 40 per cent on research; and 20 per cent on “service work” (which can mean helping out their department or other activities).

Do you like purple, sir? Because your prose is violet (see what I did there?).

Um, no. This touted ratio is an estimate, not a requirement. No one swears by it, and it varies from institution to institution (York professors teach more classes per year than U of T professors, for example). It’s hardly “a template” for an entire group of career professionals. (Although I do agree with his closing statement:

a 2012 study of public universities in 28 countries found that Canadian professors were the best paid (after accounting for differences in currencies), with salaries rising 46 per cent from 2001 to 2009, three times the inflation rate.

Yes, but not because of his rationale (Canada has more tenured professors than other countries). It’s because of the Sunshine List.)

It’s not just the pro-university writers who are apt to exaggerate, either. This largely pro-strike article, like many others, claims (incorrectly) that it is the Evil Faceless University who calls students ‘BIUs’. As this evenhanded report from the Ontario Council of University Faculty Associations points out, though, this is actually a term coined by the provincial government. So yes, you have a faceless mandarin to thank for why Johnny is unhappy at UTSC, but it’s a faceless mandarin from the Ministry, not the University.

Maybe it’s the fault of their informants, not the writers themselves — but here I thought journalists were supposed to verify.

As I mentioned in my post on higher-ed funding, the VP of UBC is touting the ‘disruptive’ force of technology as a reason universities need to step up their game. Contract North has published a piece that isn’t exactly in response, but gets at the main points: universities are a monopoly and they’re not going anywhere (at least in Canada; in the US, it’s another story).

Meanwhile, in the budgetary section, I forgot Nipissing’s* layoff of 20-odd contract faculty and a dozen staff workers to balance its budget. And Dalhouse has published an admirably readable account of where its budget goes, with the caveat of course that Nova Scotia is not Ontario.

Ontario’s universities are all publicly funded, which means that in theory they receive the same amount of money per student, plus tuition from that student. So why are only some crying poor? Laurier has announced that it is eliminating faculty and staff due to budgetary constraints. Similar reasons have been given by administrators at York and U of T to explain their ongoing labor problems.

There is some great stuff in Sarah Hampson’s latest report on the Dalhousie Dentistry School Scandal, but most people will never see it. It’s buried under a outright silly anecdote of some cloak and dagger business in a Halifax coffee shop. “The front door slaps shut with the sound of a screen door at a cottage…” isn’t quite “It was a dark and stormy night,” but it’s close.

All the talk about ‘mullioned windows” and “cottages” is foreshadowing of who the first half of this article is aimed at: Olds. Hampson is in the “cozy Victorian” cafe for a secret rendezvous with–drum roll– a crimefighter from a branch of anonymous! O-M-G! Can you believe it?!?!?! No. You can’t. The fact that you found your way here means that you are almost certainly waaaaaaaaaayyyyy too savvy to believe that some random wanker who claims to be from anonymous and arranges in person meetings with national reporters is anything but a random wanker.

Luckily, Hampson is only there to get one quote about misogyny being a problem at Dalhousie before pivoting away to an actual legitimate story. For those who don’t remember the story: It came to light that several of the male students in Dalhousie University’s school of dentistry had a facebook group which was mostly harmless, but included a few comments about hate sex with their female classmates and– and this was the one I always thought was important– using chloroform to rape girls. You can see why that’s a problem for a job that involves anesthetizing people.

Since then there has been a lot of mumbling about “restorative justice” and an open letter from the men involved describing what they learned. But the interesting bit, saved for the end, is this:

Lawyers for Ryan Millet, who blew the whistle on the Facebook group and is the only member to opt out of restorative justice and submit to the school’s disciplinary hearing, have called the disciplinary system “irrevocably broken.” This week, they issued a statement contending that the administration has made “no effort … to reach out or include him in the healing process.”

Mr. Millet feels he is being blamed in part for the “reputational harm” the university has suffered, the statement added. On Friday, the academic standards class committee found him guilty of professional misconduct related to issues of sexism, misogyny and homophobia. He will be allowed to return to clinical work on the condition that he acknowledges his guilt – something he refused to do as part of the restorative justice process – and submits to counselling and other remedial initiatives. Mr. Millet is reportedly weighing his legal options.

Haha. How do you like that. You see something fishy, report it to the proper authorities, and you end up being the only one punished. Good job Dal. Apparently more than four thousand Dal students came together to give the university president, Richard Florizine, the finger over his handling of this issue. We at J and C Read The News offer this .gif in solidarity:

And as for Ms. Hampson: nice try, but you’re no match for my meta lede-burying-fu.

Opinions about wage equity are about as polarized as the wages themselves. Most “haves” think that everything is fine and dandy. Who wants to pay $20 for a shitty movie, $50 for an average dinner for two, or $25 for a book you’ll only pretend to read? Pirate it! Groupon it! Get it for free!

As we noted yesterday, minimum wage increases, while admirable, are still not enough to provide a good life for families. Similarly, the bargaining issues on the table at Toronto universities — an increase to minimum funding (currently $15,000/year at U of T., $13,500 at York) and year-long job security — are not excessive (we don’t have an opinion on other aspects of bargaining at this time).

A ‘University of Toronto’ (actually the Scarborough Campus, which, in the time I worked there, didn’t even bother to pretend that it was anything other than a cynical attempt to cash in on the first and second generation Canadians in the area who wanted to go to school close to home) ‘professor’ (actually a spousal hire– her husband is a dean) is using the school’s imprimatur to push ‘alternative vaccines’ and a whole suite of homeopathic garbage.

And yes, it is garbage. But the thing is, you already knew that. So does Rona Ambrose, the Minister of Health who flatly refuses to stop completely inert bottles of water from being sold as “homeopathic vaccines.” Both the University and the Ministry of Health are showing us one of the inherent problems in determining your course of action by algorithm. Without bothering to reconstruct it, I am willing to bet any amount of money that their data analysts have found that people brainwashed into believing in homeopathy– and the criminals who exploit them by selling distilled water for $1000/litre– will absolutely change the way they vote or donate money based on your stance re: homeopathy. On the other hand we ‘non-stupids’ generally can’t be arsed to care, because it’s just too dumb to think about. So the algorithm will always say you should cater to the stupids– especially the extreme-stupid fringe.

Should we expect better from public servants and public institutions? Yes. Will we get better? No, not while there is money to be had from being awful.